Weekend Reading: A Whale of a Tale, The Church of Moon

Kathryn Joyce’s extensive report on foreign adoptions gone wrong, for Slate, opens with the death of Hana Williams, a thirteen-year-old girl adopted from Ethiopia who died as a result of abuse at the hands of her new American parents. Williams’s story, Joyce finds, fits a disturbingly common pattern of abuse and neglect in adoptive households, where overwhelmed parents with punitive theories of discipline fall into destructive spirals that are difficult to monitor or regulate. (Earlier this year, Reuters conducted an investigation into the market for underground adoptions that was similarly unsettling.) Joyce is unflinching yet open to complexity in her treatment of this troubling topic, and it’s worth reading to the end of her lengthy piece for the chilling, finely executed closing paragraph.

In Pacific Standard, Charles Homans has written about a long-buried environmental catastrophe resulting from Soviet whaling operations in the mid-twentieth century. For many years, Russian whalers secretly slaughtered thousands of whales, in defiance of international treaties to which the Soviet Union was party. They decimated whale populations to an extent that is still perceptible. The material facts of the story are fascinating: enormous “factory ships” equipped to disassemble a whale in half an hour; sailors stripping blubber like a peel from a banana; a scientist hiding ships’ logs in his potato cellar for years to keep them from Stalinist authorities. But the animating twist at the center is that the Soviet Union (unlike other heavy whaling countries, like Japan and Norway) didn’t have much use for whale products, and left a large part of the carcasses to rot. The pointless carnage is ultimately a mystery of human nature and responses to power. (For more high-seas whaling adventure, also check out Raffi Khatchadourian’s 2007 profile of vigilante whale-saver Paul Watson, who commands a fleet to interrupt the operations of Japanese whalers.)

Of course, people are capable of all sorts of bewildering responses to power and charisma, as we’re reminded in Mariah Blake’s story for The New Republic about the internal conflicts that are threatening to destroy Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. If, like me, you’re vaguely aware of the Moonies as a kindly fringe group with a proclivity for crowns and mass weddings, Blake provides a concise and fascinating history of the movement, from its little-known origins as a ritualistic sex cult to the current infighting and alienation among its leadership. The reverend based his teachings largely on the sacrosanct nature of the family unit (a creed that won him affiliations with powerful members of America’s Christian right), but, as old scandals start to come to light, his own fractured family appears to be pushing the church to the brink of collapse.

Finally, although it’s old, one of my favorite reads this week was an article published by The New York Review of Books in 2000, in which Maya Lin recalls the process of designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, from the moment she conceived of the idea to her first visit to the finished wall. (Thanks to the Longreads Twitter account for rebroadcasting it on Veterans Day.) Lin’s story is famous by now: she was an undergraduate at Yale when she won a competition to design the memorial, and her unconventional design, and Lin herself (young, female, and Asian), quickly became the subjects of vicious controversy. She writes in a considered, confident voice that describes her own experiences while illuminating the design challenges and conceptual questions raised by the creation of public monument. Throughout the essay, she demonstrates how she kept looping back to the central, solid kernel of her idea: “a simple impulse to cut into the earth.”